Engaging, engrossing, enthralling, compelling: The hit lists

From shopping lists and to-do lists to wish lists and bucket lists, we love to organise, order and arrange just about anything.

Scholars generally agree that the earliest forms of writing, almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia – Iraq today – were lists of livestock.

For Henry Eliot, an author and researcher for BBC comedy quiz show QI, lists are an everyday necessity and a lifelong passion. An insatiable bookworm and collector of facts, he ransacked the libraries and archives of world literature, compiling a miscellany of literary lists that are presented in his new book, Eliot’s Book Of Bookish Lists.

“We’re obsessed with lists,” Eliot said. “I love making lists. I’m keen on electronic lists that I can constantly update, rather than lots of paper lists but I find it hard to go shopping without a list, or sit down to work without a list of things to get through.

“Lists are such mundane, everyday things. They are beguiling. Simple, but can be really interesting. Like, someone else’s shopping list really gives you an insight into their life. And if you put lots of strange things into a list then it becomes a very unusual document.

“They’re so prevalent, many writers have adopted the list and seen that it’s a great way to exercise their creativity.”

Eliot’s love of lists, and literature inspired the idea for the book, which brings together lists as random as they are interesting, from the names of authors’ pets and the most bizarre deaths to befall writers to lists of great houses to appear in Jane Austen’s novels and the quickest books ever written.

“The brilliant thing about the list is that it’s an incredibly flexible format to put things in and quite a lot of these lists began from a single anecdote that I really enjoyed,” Eliot said.

“For instance, when I was writing about Robert Louis Stevenson, I discovered that he died in

Samoa while making a batch of mayonnaise. That’s so bizarre and unexpected and I thought surely there are some other authors who died in unexpected ways so that became a list in the book.”

Bookish Lists is the fifth book for Eliot, a former editor for Penguin and author of The Penguin Classics and The Modern Penguin Classics, and he says his aim was to “delight, inspire and surprise”.

“I had a rule that was none of the lists could be simply functional or just information. There had to be a twist or something delightful about it that was unexpected or a bit charming.

“So the book isn’t just a list of books, it’s like a box of chocolates and each one is a beautifully designed little nugget,” he said.

“The lists in the book are very wide-ranging. In terms of the books that they cover, I think they range from the oldest reference I make to the oldest joke ever written down, which is a 2000 BC fart joke, which I felt we had to list somewhere in a list of literary fart jokes.

“It covers a 4,000-year period and there’s everything from alphabetical lists, of which my favourite is the list of single letter titles. My favourite thing about that is that only the letter R hasn’t been written yet. Every other letter of the alphabet has a book named after it.

“But there’s also lists of selections of my favourite examples of things so, for instance, lists of my favourite subtitles, or some of my favourite authors who only wrote one novel or my favourite authors epitaphs on their graves. And then also some quite surprising ones like the fact that all the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespearian characters, or authors that have appeared on paper bank notes. So it’s a real mixture.”